Magical History Tour: Sam Irlander's Fascination with The Beatles Has Led to a Collection of 30 Fab Guitars
 On February 9, 1964, when the Beatles made their U.S. television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, nine-year-old Brooklynite Sam Irlander was one of the 73 million or so watching, and he was hooked. He watched them when they returned to Sullivan the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that.
Eventually, he became so enthralled with the lads from Liverpool, and rock and roll music in general, that he asked his parents to buy him a guitar. Almost five decades later, he still clearly remembers his mother's response. "She said, 'Why don't you go in the closet and pull out the accordion that I bought for your brother and that he never played?' I said, 'I don't want to play accordion, I want to play guitar!' That was the end of the discussion."
Irlander never did learn to play guitar, or accordion, or any other instrument, during his youth. Instead, he went to college and got into real estate, which has treated him well for the past 41 years. Today, he's the president and CEO of the commercial firm Parker Madison Partners and the author of several widely used textbooks on real estate sales. But even as he moved upward in business, he maintained his love for music in his spare time by becoming a DJ and spinning records at clubs around New York, including the fabled Studio 54, in the Seventies and Eighties. "That's how I got my frustrations out," he says. "It was a way of staying close to music, even though I couldn't make it myself."
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